Gaikai – Sony Deal Never Existed, Says Founder Dave Perry

June 6, 2012 Written by Sebastian Moss

One of the biggest rumors leading up to the Sony E3 conference was that the company would announce a partnership with, or buy, a cloud company, namely Gaikai. With the show now a fading memory, the deal never happened, leading many to wonder what happened.

I wasn’t even at the Sony press conference. I was sitting in my hotel room, and I know everyone was like, ‘Oh my god, are they going to announce cloud gaming?’ And I was like, ‘No, they’re not going to announce cloud gaming.’ I wasn’t even there!

The big announcement Gaikai had planned was actually a deal with Samsung, rather than Sony, for TVs. But could there be a PlayStation deal with Gaikai that just wasn’t shown at E3?

No, no. To give you my real take on it, I honestly can’t think of a future for the console companies that don’t include cloud gaming at some point. They can hold out as long as they want to, but at some point, you don’t want to be the console that can’t do this. To some extent, I expect all three of them will have this.

The original rumor stems back to Eurogamer sister site VG247, which claimed Sony would partner with a cloud company at E3. This was later backed up by MCV, who added that Sony was actually close to buying the company. GI.biz, also a Eurogamer site, then came in with a rumor saying that Gaikai would team up with Sony to stream PS2 and PS1 games. Why exactly all these sites were so convinced that the rumor was true is unclear, although it does go to show that you should never trust random internet rumors without hard evidence.

Of course, with the first rumors only saying “either OnLive or Gaikai”, there’s a chance that Sony could be partnering with OnLive, but at this point I wouldn’t suggest getting your hopes up.